Sabrejet- I accept your point. On the other hand they seem to have found a wreckage (let’s ignore the negative comments on this thread) that fits the narrative as far as they can tell. I accept that what little has been posted won’t convince anyone with a cynical take on these things. I count myself in that group but I am a trained scientist, so I work on the idea that every hypothesis is to be considered but it must stand up to scrutiny.. They have said that it looks right. END OF THE STORY FOR NOW. At some point they intend to dive the wreck and get more detail and better views. This is the scientific method. It looks good, but we have to further test the hypothesis. When more data is available then we can test several hypotheses. 1- is this the right aircraft? 2 carry out a formal aircraft crash investigation.

Dear MR Scott-Davies
Are life members who don’t pay into the fund still permitted to attend the AGM? I ask as one who is but doesn’t understand where the Society stands today?

Hi. I have been away for a while, and I came back intending to apologise for derailing a thread. I am glad that there are others out there who have issues with the automatic attacks on folk wearing protective kit.
May I now summarise?
1- always fly as safe as you can
2- fire only respects fuel, and that may include you
3- in a fire cotton or nomex is way better than nylon
4- in Germany there is a broken airframe and an injured pilot. Aluminium can be replaced if you want to, but human flesh is much more tricky- as I remember in my former day job. I wish the pilot and his friends and family all my best wishes.

I have been on both sides of the “flight suit” argument. I once asked one of my instructors why he wore a flight suit. He offered 2 arguments- the first was that as a former RAF fighter pilot that was what he was used to, and then he gave me the positive benefits that I repeated earlier in this thread. I didn’t say anything about the leather gloves- I still use them to drive in because they are environment-proof; the same is true of using them while flying. Actually, I don’t know where my original gloves are. I suspect that they were left in a moment of forgetfulness in the last plane I flew in, before my brain went into meltdown. I now have another set that I use for driving. Having taken his thoughts on board I got a flight suit. All of your plans fitted on the kneepads. Pens fitted in the loops on the shoulders. If you went into IMC the stopwatch was on one breast pocket and could be stuck on a bit of Velcro on your knee having taken it out of a breast pocket. THe suit was incredibly helpful while flying for my IMC rating. After a number of flight base moves I ran into the “Walter Mitty” school of thought at my flight base and was driven into flying in “civvies”, at which point I had to totally rethink how I managed all of the “stuff” you need in the left seat. I don’t think that I ever managed to get it all together in a form that didn’t need me to reach into the luggage bay (And while doing so take my head out of just safely flying the aircraft) to retrieve something I needed when plans A and B and C went to rat****.
ZRX61- I take your thought that ANY flight suit is of limited value when Avgas 100 Low lead burns at a temperature that melts the aluminium structure of your aircraft, but anything that isn’t nylon that burns in a clinging form has to offer a better option than the stuff that most folk fly in. I grant that an in flight fire is a low likelihood event, but I really don’t understand the prejudice from a lot of flyers against the use of flight suits. I wore mine because it was a comfortable and useful solution for my flying- and the biggest beast I ever flew was a Cessna 182. Not a warbird.

Looking at it from another direction, I have just booked my trip to Oshkosh for this season, so hopefully I will see the US celebration of 100 years of the RAF.

Few, however, are quite as asymmetric as the Rutan Boomerang.

The key bit there is Mark 12’s response-
“Alas no link to an RAF serial from this data alone.” There might be register that could contribute somewhere but he does not appear to know of one. And if he doesn’t an answer is unlikely to be forthcoming.

To Mark’s thought about inspector 145. We have lost so much about the small print having never collected it when the people were there. In my time in the Spitfire Society I suggested the creation of a “gin and tape recorder” fund. The basic idea was that the guys who had been there rarely talked- if you have been there you understand so we don’t have to and if you haven’t you won’t understand, so there I was when my engine failed at 20 000 feet……… On the other hand, if you got someone who HAD been there and he (in those days it was he) had a tape recorder and a bottle or two of something, then maybe you could get something extra on the record- everyone who was involved had a story to tell and sometimes the smallest detail can solve a story. It came to nothing, I regret. Are there really no records that offer who “inspector 145” was?